Category: life

Tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day. Make sure to avoid shopping or at least feel “encouraged to reflect on the role money plays in your live and in society as a whole” (Japan Times).

My server is up and running again. All websites were down from Monday to Friday – I am very very sorry for this. One reason for the long outage was that I was on the road during the week. Pretty bad timing..

It is definite. This weekend I will leave Romania and go to my hometown in Germany to start working as a part-time teacher in English and computers. I have no clue yet what exactly I will be teaching, but I like surprises. 🙂 Apart from the teaching currently there are smaller and bigger freelance jobs coming in as well. A winter full of work – my wallet (that I don’t have) will be very happy. Sighisoara is rainy, so it will be easy to leave.

A little update on the bicycle protest in Bucharest: It took place last Sunday and about 200 people attended. I couldn’t make it unfortunately, but have a look at these pictures (pictures 2, pictures 3) and this Indymedia article (Romanian only). The protest was about a new fantastic law that forbids bicycle travel on main roads in the capital. However, plans about the protest made their rounds in the local media and in the morning before the protest it was announced that the law is being withdrawn from the agenda. Good stuff, eh?

Great news: As of today my eco activist friends of EYFA (European Youth for Action) run their website on my server! It is a very special moment for me, because through EYFA my life got a quite different direction about three years ago. In 2002 I first attended their annual Ecotopia camp in Ireand. There I met active, idealistic and positive thinking people that have a good understanding of what is going wrong in our western-style lifes, and for the best of it that have real-world solutions, as well as the strong beliefs to put them in action or to campaign for them. They do not expect anything in return but to see the world becoming a little better. I was long looking for people like these “Ecotopians”. When at the camp I saw that also I can give a contribution and spontanously decided to give a small workshop about Open Source software. Since then every year I attended Ecotopia and gave similar workshops, until this year Arthur stepped in and gave his own workshop about the same topic. In 2004 I started hosting the EYFA wiki and discussion forum and I helped with the winter meeting in Pula/Croatia. In the beginning of 2005 EYFA sponsored the development of my Informal software, which they use to simplify the registration progress for their meetings. So now things finally come together on my server. 🙂

What am I working on at the moment? A web form manager called Informal – wow, how exciting I hear you say. Well, I think it is going to be a very useful thing for many people. My friends at EYFA are using it since a while for their meetings and it saves them a lot of work. I just put up a first project page, so if you like have a look to see what it’s all about: Informal. If you have some ideas or comments, please let me know.

The bicycle protest was cancelled because of bad weather. I have no news yet about when it will happen.

There will be a bicycle protest in Bucharest tomorrow, 1st of November. Pretty much like a Critical Mass. As far as I know it’s the first thing like this in Bucharest, if not even in Romania. People will gather at the National Theatre in the centre at 6pm, block some street for a few minutes, holding up some signs and then cycle off on the street to the Eroilor park. The aim is to raise awareness about the lack of support for bicyclists from Bucharest city planners (there is almost no support at all) and to show to car drivers that “We are people like you, with the same rights. You have a lot metall around you, make noise and pump fumes into the air – we prefer not to”. More info (in Romanian) at the Incepem mailing list. I will go down to Bucharest if I can organise a bike and post here how it went.

Latest news: No, no bird flu in Mangalia yet, and with good food from Miruna’s mum I’m happily tapping away on my laptop to catch up with many things that piled up over the summer: freelance and voluntary projects, server/hosting related things and many emails. I’m on a dial-up connection, so not surfing around or blogging a lot. Also I’m not moving around too much, so there’s nothing to write about anyway. 😉 But I’m off to Bucharest for a few days now: Minibus to Constanta, trolley bus number 5 to the end right on the road towards Bucharest, waiting for a little, lift to a metro station in Bucharest – business as usual, hehe. Now that I seem a bit like a local to my drivers they usually expect the common fee for a lift of about half the price of the cheapest train ticket from me. And I am happy to pay, because it’s not the adventure that I’m travelling for, but mere transportation.

Well, on the 9th the server got hacked again. We did not have the time to check if it was a consequence of the first worm infection, because we had to chance but to take the server offline and re-install Debian straight away. Now with a lot of care of what we are putting back online we slowly get running again. Sorry for the website downtimes to all.